Under the Arizona Sun, a $1-Billion Campus-Construction Plan Melts Away

Grim state-budget outlooks continue to disrupt colleges’ building plans from coast to coast. An article in The Arizona Republic is the latest to detail the unraveling of campus-construction projects.

“Everything is on hold,” said the University of Arizona’s senior vice president for business affairs, Joel Valdez, about the seeming demise of what was called the Stimulus Plan for Economic and Education Development, or Speed. The plan, created last summer in the State Legislature, was to have given Mr. Valdez’s institution and the state’s two other public universities — Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University — access to $1-billion in state lottery money to use in an in-state economic-stimulus effort aimed at creating jobs in Arizona’s hard-hit construction industry.

But after the plan became law last summer, worries about state revenue increased, and legislators and bureaucrats refused to sign off on more than a handful of projects. Now a bill in the State Senate would cancel almost all of the Speed program, except for $167-million in projects that have already been given a green light.

Universities are going forward, however, with a couple of construction projects that were never part of the Speed program, including a 1,000-bed, $116-million housing project at the University of Arizona and a $120-million honors college at Arizona State. The latter project is being done in collaboration with an outside development company.